Thang, in Vietnamese, means victory. Dr. Nguyen Dinh Thang, executive director of Boat People SOS (BPSOS), is equal to it. Recently, a large group of community-based organizations nominated Dr. Thang as a “hero” with the Trafficking-In-Persons Office at the U .S. State Department, citing his outstanding work in combating trafficking. Many in the Vietnamese American community also expect him to be appointed in the White House Asian American and Pacific Islander Commission.

Results will be known in a few months. Meanwhile, Dr. Thang is already gearing for a new challenge. He announced a ten-year, national plan to engage Vietnamese Americans in helping improve the community and society at large. He said, “2010 is the perfect year to launch my new, decade-long initiative, since it marks 35 years of the Vietnamese American presence here, and 30 years of BPSOS operation.’

Dr. Thang has already started incubating the Renewing Democracy Fund, a political action committee that will encourage and support Vietnamese Americans who want to run for public office, regardless of party affiliation.

Another plan is to start the Vietnamese American Research Institute. The goal: To bring together Vietnamese American scholars, researchers and academicians to conduct applied research on issues affecting the community and Mainstream America.

Most recently, he co-founded the Vietnamese American National Chamber of Commerce. Its mission: “To empower the community through business development under the highest of standards.”

“I will travel the country to share the vision and work with local communities to create real impact,” Dr. Thang declared. He attributes his vision and his methodical approach to his engineering background: “By education and profession, I am a problem-solver.”

Doubtless, he will succeed again. This author has known Thang for over ten years, and he never ceases to amaze. He has a track record of victories. Consider: While fighting to save Vietnamese boat people in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, Dr. Thang initiated a program to train future leaders for the Vietnamese American community. He established an internship program to encourage young Vietnamese Americans to participate in mainstream politics.

Under his mentorship, college students and graduates learned the art of advocacy through hands-on assignments. Dr. Thang took them to the Capitol to meet with members of Congress and to Foggy Bottom to talk to State Department officials. One of them, Joseph Cao of New Orleans, recently became the first Vietnamese American member of the U.S. Congress. Others are now leaders in their communities.

Understanding the difficulties of new arrivals, years ago he also started to train newly-arrived refugees for college entrance exams. Those students are now scientists, physicians, business owners and professors.

Over the years, Dr. Thang has started numerous local programs and national initiatives to address the needs of underserved and at-risk communities, and spawned new organizations to empower, organize and equip disenfranchised sub-populations. He initiated projects in volunteerism, mass media (he had co-published a youth magazine in Vietnamese with national distribution), domestic violence, and savings for households, homeownership and entrepreneurship.

To support this rapidly expanding operation, Dr. Thang relies on what he does best: community organizing. To illustrate: In early 2008, he co-founded Coalition to Abolish Modern-day Slavery in Asia (CAMSA). He worked with volunteers to set up CAMSA Champion Teams. These teams organized local fundraising events, hosted workshops, and participated in public awareness campaigns. Two pilot teams, located in the D.C. metro area and Orange County, California, within months generated over $10,000 to fund the operation in Malaysia. Dr. Thang’s goal is to set up local teams across the country.

Within the first month of operation, this coalition of four international organizations rescued nearly 3,000 labor-trafficking victims in Malaysia and Jordan. Eight months later, CAMSA had already made significant contributions to the passage of Taiwan’s first anti-trafficking law. CAMSA currently has a permanent operation in Malaysia and will soon expand to Thailand and Taiwan.

“Dr Thang’s vision and work are not those of the timekeeper, but of the clock maker,” said Shandon Phan, among many young Vietnamese Americans who, inspired by Dr. Thang’s vision, joined his cause. “We have many inspiring stories of success, but what inspires me is the strategic development of democratic institutions which Dr. Thang spearheaded, specially the support of civil society in Southeast Asia.”

Anti-Trafficking Work

In 1999, he learned of the plight of 250 Vietnamese and Chinese workers trafficked to the American Samoa, forced to work long hours in a sweatshop without pay. Some days they were not even fed, and had to beg for food. Thang worked with pro bono lawyers, the media and federal agencies to plan a rescue, and in late 2000 over 200 of the victims were taken by federal agents and brought to the United States.

Dr. Thang mobilized community support to pay for the airfare for scores of the victims, and he placed others in temporary housing and found jobs for many more. This turned out to be the largest labor-trafficking case ever prosecuted by the federal government. The owner of the sweatshop is serving a 40-year sentence in Honolulu, while most of his former victims have secured legal permanence and are on their way to becoming U.S. citizens.

Thang did not stop there. Seeing that human trafficking was a threat to human dignity the world over, in 2001 he launched a new initiative, Victims of Exploitation and Trafficking Assistance. This has contributed to the emergence of many new programs and organizations combating human trafficking across the U.S. and in other countries. The initiative has provided training to hundreds of pro bono lawyers, law enforcement agents, and social workers in the U.S. as well as in Taiwan, Ukraine, Russia, Japan, and the Philippines.

Visionary and Advocate

Since 1989, Dr. Thang has dedicated his life to community service as head of BPSOS. BPSOS is a non-profit organization that helps refugees and immigrants, whether they are in Vietnam, on the high seas, in refugee camps, or in the U.S. For the past 30 years, he has worked extensively with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the U.S. and European governments, and Southeast Asian governments to address crises on the open seas and in refugee camps.

In 12 years, from a one-office, one-staff organization, BPSOS has become a national agency operating in 18 locations across the U.S., with a staff of 130 professionals and a budget of $10 million.

In 1991, Dr. Thang co-founded, and served as the first Chairman of Legal Assistance for Vietnamese Asylum Seekers (LAVAS). Within months, he successfully established a LAVAS legal aid office in the Philippines, and six months later, a second one in Hong Kong. From these two beachheads, teams of pro bono LAVAS lawyers entered refugee camps to help Vietnamese boat people challenge unfair denials of refugee status and orders of forced repatriation.

In 1992, using information gathered by LAVAS, Thang launched a legislative advocacy campaign that eventually gained the support of the U.S. Congress and the Clinton White House and resulted in the resettlement in the U.S. of 18,000 Vietnamese boat people after their involuntary repatriation to Vietnam.

In the face of the welfare and immigration changes of 1996, which critically impacted many Vietnamese Americans, Dr. Thang got himself elected president of the Board of the Vietnamese Community of Washington, DC. Maryland and Virginia. A year later, he launched a program to assist Vietnamese seniors and torture survivors in Northern Virginia in the naturalization process. By becoming US citizens, they would preserve their access to medical care benefits. This initiative has been replicated in a dozen locations across the U.S., and has helped over a thousand individuals become U.S. citizens.

The following year, Thang co-founded the Committee for Religious Freedom in Vietnam, which has focused U.S. and international attention on Vietnamese government violations of religious freedom. In 1999, he established Empowerment and Support through Teamwork (NEST), a community organizing effort. In 10 years, this initiative has secured over $2 million in funding for over 50 grassroots and faith-based organizations across the country.

Women were among the prime recipients of Thang’s multiple community services. Alarmed to know that women in Vietnam and in the U.S. had the highest rate of mortality among cervical cancer victims, Dr. Thang received a grant to organize a conference in 2000 on the Impact of Cervical Cancer among Vietnamese Women. This writer was in charge of the project and invited medical experts, as well as health care providers, to educate hundreds of Vietnamese families about this ailment.

Immigrant Ethic

Dr. Thang’s dedication can be traced to his roots. In Vietnam, Thang escaped the Communist regime and survived the Pacific Ocean to land in Malaysia with his parents and two younger siblings. After seven months in a refugee camp, he arrived in the U.S. in 1979 as a “boat people refugee.” From there, he used his talents to serve both the Vietnamese and the Americans, even the international community. He has never stopped even in the face of the most daunting obstacles.

Notwithstanding the harsh adjustment required by a new country, he entered Northern Virginia Community College only months after his arrival in the Washington area. He immediately co-founded the Vietnamese Students Association, which operates to this day. He completed two years of undergraduate study in nine months and transferred to Virginia Tech. It took him only two years there to complete his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering.

In 1984, while working on his PhD, he took leave to teach computer science and physics at Montgomery College in Maryland. There, he volunteered to serve as advisor to the Vietnamese Students’ Association and mentored newly-arrived students. Within the next three years, he completed both an M.S. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech.

For 13 years, Thang worked as an engineer and a quality control manager at a Navy lab in Bethesda, Maryland. During that period, he continued to volunteer in many community service projects, the majority of which he initiated.

The Chinese lunar calendar of the Tiger predicts wealth and power in the New Year. His many supporters hope that Dr. Thang, a social entrepreneur with enormous energy and an iron determination, will come out victorious in his future endeavors. Dr. Thang’s work brings to mind an Asian proverb: “A tiger died and left his skin. A person died and left his name.”